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OER Africa, an initiative
of SAIDE, has been established to play a leading role in driving
the development and use of OER in higher education systems on the
African continent. This article reflects the central thinking of
Catherine Ngugi, the OER Africa Programme Director, and Neil Butcher,
the OER Africa Strategist.
In brief, the concept of OER describes educational resources that
are freely available for use by educators and learners, without
an accompanying need to pay royalties or license fees. A broad spectrum
of frameworks is emerging to govern how OER are licensed for use,
some of which simply allow copying and others that make provision
for users to adapt the resources that they use.
OER is not synonymous with online learning or e-learning, and indeed,
in an African context, it is anticipated that many OERs produced
–while shareable in a digital format (both online and via
offline formats such as CD-ROM) – would need to be printable
to be useful. Thus, we anticipate that a very high percentage of
resources of relevance to African higher education will be shared
as RTF or similar files (for purposes of adaptation) and packaged
as PDF files (for purposes of printing).
High quality human resources are vital to national development and
the creation of global competitiveness. A key component to producing
these human resources is an effective, quality higher education
system. While in most African countries higher education was regarded
as a vital instrument of development immediately after independence,
(late 1960s to early 70s), it came to be accorded greatly reduced
priority in the mid 1980s by leading donor countries, international
agencies, and some African governments. The last two decades have
seen a rapid rise in student enrolments at most institutions, but
a corresponding reduction, in real terms, in the public financial
resources allocated to higher education institutions. Where increases
in funding have taken place, they have generally not been sufficient
to combat the combined effects of inflation and growing student
enrolments. This has impacted on issues of quality as resources
failed to match the rate of increase in enrolment and African universities
have been called upon to do more with less in terms of infrastructure,
teaching and research facilities, and staff.
Within this context, our ‘Theory of Change’ for OER
begins by identifying a clear set of specific problems, see
attached for details.
Given the above context, the following key assumptions become
essential to consider when harnessing the potential of OER in African
higher education:
- Increased availability of high quality, relevant, need-targeted
learning materials can contribute to more productive learners
and faculty members. This is particularly important in African
higher education contexts, as structural under-investment in curriculum/materials
design and ongoing professional development have left a significant
legacy of either outdated or inadequate curricula and teaching
materials.
- Because OER removes restrictions around copying existing resources,
it holds potential for reducing the cost of accessing educational
materials in environments where students often cannot afford to
buy textbooks and libraries are insufficiently resourced to supply
ongoing demand for high quality educational materials.
- The principle of allowing adaptation of materials can contribute
to enabling learners to be active participants in educational
processes, whereby they learn by doing and creating, not just
by passively reading and absorbing. By making this widely understood,
OER can play a significant supporting role in improving the quality
of pedagogy in African higher education institutions. However,
it is essential to remember that – at its core – OER
is a concept focused on changing licensing frameworks for educational
resources, not a strategy for transforming educational practice.
While it can support the latter, such transformation depends on
a grounded understanding of the requirements to design effective
education and strong institutional commitment to supporting efforts
to support design and implementation of high quality educational
programmes.
- The potential of OER is best achieved through a collaborative
partnership of people working in communities of practice, preferably
across institutions (although sometimes also within them). Collaborative
OER processes built on networks of peer faculty members can lead
to increased availability of relevant, need-targeted learning
materials, achieving a better understanding of learners’
needs and motivating meaningful contributions from participating
institutions. Where such partnerships do currently exist in African
higher education, they are predominantly with developed country
institutions, most – but not all – of which tend to
be structured as contributions by the Northern institutions either
in kind or in resources to the Southern institutions, rather than
true relationships between equals. Very few paces exist to stimulate
partnerships across African countries, although this is potentially
a very powerful way of leveraging the limited capacity that exists
within the continent’s higher education systems.
- OER has the potential to build capacity in African higher education
institutions by providing educators with access, at reduced cost,
to the tools and content required to produce high quality educational
materials and complete the necessary instructional design to integrate
such materials into high quality programmes of learning. While
OER themselves attract no licensing fees, it is important to note
that it is nevertheless critical to spend money on designing new
materials or adapting existing materials to fit a specific educational
context. Channels of access (Internet access, distribution of
printed materials, and so on) need to be sufficiently robust to
ensure that OER are accessible to those who need them. All efforts
to harness OER to support African higher education should systematically
build institutional capacity to enable African universities to
deliver quality higher education programmes to their growing student
populations.
- To be successful and sustainable, development of OER cannot
be a sideline activity within a university. It must be integrated
into institutional processes in order to both leverage its potential
and provide for its sustainability. Likewise, institutional policies,
particularly around intellectual property rights, remuneration,
and promotion, need to be adapted to support and sustain development
and use of OER, systematically and consistently improve and update
curricula and teaching materials, reduce operating costs, develop
institutional capacity, and manage growing student cohorts more
effectively.
- The potential of OER can help to facilitate collaborations between
faculty members and students at different institutions, and establish
a new economic model for procuring and publishing learning materials.
Ultimately, a key to its success will be to demonstrate that,
in the medium- to long-term OER processes will help over-stretched
faculty members to manage their work more effectively, rather
than adding new work requirements to their job description.
In the light of the above possibilities OER Africa seeks to facilitate
the design of OER that can work immediately and add educational
value within the current ICT infrastructure constraints of any participating
institutions. This is particularly important given that these infrastructure
constraints are typically more severe in Africa than in other parts
of the world, and the need to have an impact immediately is very
strong. Conversely, proving the potential of a concept that will
only have an impact when these infrastructural constraints are removed
is of little value to African higher education institutions in the
short to medium term. From this perspective, it becomes essential
to keep proposed interventions simple and focused, rather than over-burdening
them with developmental agendas that are disproportionately large
and complex for the scale of intervention designed.
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